South Africa

As the ruling African National Congress promises, with an eye on a coming election and the collapse in its popular support under Jacob Zuma, to expropriate land without compensation urban land occupations continue, and continue to face serious repression from the ruling party and the state.

There has been a massive international reaction to the vote in South Africa to begin the process of land reform, but the ANC is not interested in real land redistribution and persecutes the shack dwellers who are carrying it out.

Lindsay Weiss explores the relationship between the 1886 'closed labour compounds' of the South African diamond industry, the concentration camps of the 1899-1902 Anglo-Boer war, and the german camps used in th Herero and Nama massacre of 1904. The article makes a critical contribution to linking the wartime camps with to earlier colonial forced labour camps outside wartime, especially since camps in the Boer war have been almost exclusively explored by military historians.

Baruch Hirson on the 1922 South African general strike. HIrson deals at length with the racial politics of the strike, which despite militancy and facing aerial bombings by the newly formed South African Air Force failed to include the black working class, who had been out on strike regularly in the proceeding three years.

Written by a leading Fanon scholar, and with an acute philosophical intelligence, Fanonian Practices in South Africa is a sophisticated attempt to examine post-apartheid South Africa through the emancipatory lens of Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary humanism.

Biometric identification and registration systems are being proposed by governments and businesses across the world. Surprisingly they are under most rapid, and systematic, development in countries in Africa and Asia. In this groundbreaking book, Keith Breckenridge traces how the origins of the systems being developed in places like India, Mexico, Nigeria and Ghana can be found in a century-long history of biometric government in South Africa.

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